The story of a Yale scientist who hasn’t showered for 5 years: how did the result go? | the Chronicle

James hamblin, teacher of the school of Yale Public Health and expert in preventive medicine, he gave his life a radical change that he does not regret. Moved to new York since Angels five years ago he lives in a small studio and he hasn’t touched a shower since. She put down shampoo and conditioner, body soap and other personal care products like deodorant, moisturizers and scrubs.

Since moving, he’s been living in an “existential audit”, and that’s where he started to envision all the things that could happen without. And if all those products that most of us use on a daily basis – shampoo and soap to remove sebum from our skin, moisturizer to replace it – were more effective in making us buy more products, he said. request ? What if swimming so often was really bad for you? So Hamblin thought and he claims he was right. What he never stopped doing was washing his hands and brushing his teeth.

The five years without a shower culminated in a book, Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less. “I know a lot of people who swim very little. I knew it was possible, but wanted to try it for myself to see what the effect would be.”, recounted his 2015 decision. “Over time, your body gets used to it more and more, so it doesn’t smell so bad if you don’t use deodorant and soap. And your skin doesn’t get so oily when you stop using them. strong soaps. “.

According to Hamblin, “A lot of people use shampoo to remove oils from their hair and then apply conditioner to add synthetic oils. If you can break this cycle, your hair will end up looking like it was when you first started out. use these products. “. However, he pointed out that “The main thing is to understand that it takes time, it does not happen overnight, it is not immediate”. The scientist was a gradualist and was able to achieve the expected effects.

The process

She started using less shampoo, soap, and deodorant, and bathing less often than she did every day. “There were times when I wanted to take a shower because I missed him, he smelled bad and I felt like I was fat. But it started to happen to me less and less,” he claimed.

In the 2016 note, after a year had passed, he wrote that “Body odor is the product of bacteria that live on our skin and feed on the oily secretions of sweat and the sebaceous glands that are the basis of our hair follicles”. He detailed that “When you shower aggressively, you destroy ecosystems. They repopulate quickly, but species become imbalanced and tend to favor the types of microbes that produce odors.”. This is followed by a regulatory process. “Your ecosystem comes to a steady state and you stop smelling bad. You don’t smell like rose water. You just smell like a person.”.

Hamblin clarified that it was not that his body did not emit odors, but that “The populations of microbes in my body do not produce the classic body stench that they always have”.

How is your hygiene?

“I rinse when I need it or when I want to, just with water, quickly, especially when my hair seems to wake me up or if I have something visibly dirty”, He said. “But you can exfoliate, you can remove the oils just by rubbing with your hands and combing your hair every now and then. And that’s it.”. What he has never stopped doing is washing his hands and brushing his teeth.

“Most people did not have access to running water for the past hundred years”, he said of the bathroom routine. “It was something that maybe royalty could do, kings and queens, but people could only do occasionally. Maybe they entered a river or a lake, but it didn’t was not something we had to do every day. “ to which is added that “A lot of people used homemade soaps and didn’t use them every day either, because they were very harsh on the skin.”.

Should the world stop showering?

Seeing the scientist’s new way of life, many people wondered if they should follow the same path. But Hamblin called the shower a “preference” and said “it is not a medical necessity”. “I’m not telling people that they should give up (bathe “, he said. He simply advised people to try showering less, using less shampoo and milder deodorants. “You can start with shorter, less frequent, colder showers, less soap. It doesn’t have to be dramatic.”, Hill.